


The bar at the end of this story.

by litra



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: ...ish, Doctor Who References, Fire, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, Time Travel, i wrote this while half asleep, schrodingers cat, sort of, time remnant Mick Rory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-23 23:38:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10729650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/litra/pseuds/litra
Summary: Mick Rory has lived several lifetimes, but he would always end up at the bar at the end of the universe.





	The bar at the end of this story.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so I started this at midnight and wrote most of it while half asleep. It is unbeta'd. I don't really know where it came from. *shrug*

He knows his name was once Mick Rory. He knows he was a thief, then a supervillain in Central City in the twenty first century. That was his first lifetime, up until his partner had dumped him in the woods in medieval germany and the time masters had found him.

His second lifetime was spent with a collar around his neck. He was Chronos. Until he found he couldn’t kill Lenny. Sometimes he counts that as the end of his second life, but it wasn’t truly over until he lost the waverider. He sent it off with Hourman and it didn’t have more than one jump left anyway. He still has the jump ship, but the parts to fix it wouldn’t be invented for another 200 years or so. He knows sending Rex worked because time ripped around him. A gift from the Time Masters, immunity to paradox, at least where his own life is concerned. It means he’s a time remnant though, and that’s a dangerous thing.

He spent the 50s and 60s in a temporal dead zone in Wyoming. He does odd jobs and keeps his head down. The time masters may not be around anymore in his personal time line, but that’s the tricky thing about time travel. Then one day Sue at the grocers comments about how he looks the same, and he realizes he’s not ageing. That’s the start of his third life.

He starts moving around. The immortality bit surprised him, except for how it didn’t. The time masters did a lot of crazy things to him and he still doesn’t know about all of it. It’s not too bad. Not like the mopy vampires in those books. He already knew what it was like to pull himself back together after being unmade, and his skillset is valued in any century. Being hired muscle may not be a lofty goal, but at least he won't screw up anything big.

He spent most of the late 80s and 90s in a drunken stupor. It had been so hard not to go back to Central, pluck Len and himself out of harm's way. Kill Len’s monster of a father before he could do any real damage. Or later to warn them, about that first job, about the later job that gave him the old burns he still wears, about any of a million little things. Even to just keep an eye on them, make sure his past self doesn’t screw it up any worse than he did the first time. Make sure Len ends up on the right path. Later he finds out about the Legion of Doom and puts his fist through a wall, but there isn’t that familiar ripple of the timeline changing, so whatever happened, the team must have handled it.

He met Savage once, or again. After they’d tried and failed to kill each other they’d had a good drink. Savage offered him a job, but it was too closely linked with his own history. Rory’d asked about the temporal coupling almost as an afterthought. He’d forgotten that Savage had access to the Time Masters.

Fixing the jump ship is the end of his third lifetime. He changes his name. Rip did it for a reason, and there’s another Mick Rory out there somewhere. He has his own life and Chronos has his. Plus Chronos was an agent of the Time Masters, which gives him some protection against other time travelers who might want to off him. He knows how to use a strong reputation.

He finally makes it to Aruba. It's nice for a while, but eventually he gets restless. 

He visits the great fire of London. Then starts the great fire of London when the kid in the bakery fails to get distracted and puts the first fire out in time.

He visits the great Chicago fire, which he doesn’t have to help along. He goes to San Francisco in the wake of that one big earthquake and watches the fires spread across the city from the top of a hill. 

He spends two years apprenticing at a chinese fireworks factory before it becomes too much like work. 

He cultivates a new appreciation for volcanos. The Jump ship AI, which isn’t quite Gideon even if he calls her that, has to keep repairing the personal forcefield he picked up in some future spaceport. 

He’s in Pompeii, prepared to sample the local wine for the next two days until the main event, when he meets the guy. They both draw, when they realize what the other is, but it doesn’t take long to settle the fact that while they are both time travelers, neither is there to kill the other one.

“Jack Harkness” he says, offering a hand.

Mick scoffs because even he gets that reference, “Cronos.”

“You sure that’s the best name to be using in this era?” His new drinking partner asks, pulling up a chair across the small table from him.

Mick shrugs. If the guy doesn’t know who he is, then at least he doesn’t have to bluff about why he’s there. “Either the locals think I’m a god, or working for a god. I can convince them not to mess with me either way. Besides, what are they going to say? Chronos walked the streets of Pompeii…” He leaves the sentence hanging, and the other man nods. It’s a vivid reminder of the upcoming events.

Mick doesn’t speak to other time travelers often. They tend to fall into two groups, the scoundrels who are like as not to stab you in the back, and the young optimists who are trying to save the world. He’d already done his stint as a hero, and as for the other sort, well, he wasn’t looking for a new crew to run with.

Maybe if Len were there….

But he’s not. Hasn’t been for a long time.

Sometimes he wonders if that pain will ever go away.

He gets drunk on sweet dark wine with the other time traveler, swapping stories that probably sound bizarre to anyone not in the know. The guy has a job to do though. Information that has to be planted so that someone can dig it up in a couple hundred years and come up with a theory that will influence something or other. Jack’s a professional, and Mick respects him for it even if he’d never want that job in a million years.

Jack’s watch beeps and he says he has to go. “You know how it goes, timing and all that.”

Mick nods.

“Say, why don’t we get another drink sometime.” Jack’s got a wide lazy grin. Mick considers it. There are plenty of times and places he can go to scratch an itch, but if he’s honest, it’s nice to talk to someone who understands.

“Sure.”

Jack lets his fingers trail down Mick’s arm, before typing a set of coordinates into his gauntlet. It’s a temporal location rather than something as simple as a phone number, but he can work with that.

Except the coordinates are to the vanishing point.

Mick watches Pompeii erupt with a sinking feeling in his gut.

He goes forward, to the end of earth, the hours when the sun expands and eats everything. He stares at it for hours, the jump ship parked just out of range. He watches it until it pushes everything else out of his head. He keeps watching until his body is too weak to keep standing and he passes out. After all, there’s no one left to tell him to stop.

When he wakes up Gideon has taken them back to 2016, some kind of safety feature that he never bothered to reset. He watches invisibly as Len tells Rip to go fuck himself for the first time.

He decides to stop running.

Mick lands at the vanishing point. It’s different obviously, but it’s also the same. Being outside of time means there’s no entropy, at least in this context. So unless someone deliberately changes something, it stays put. At the vanishing point, a person’s will is more important than strength or knowledge. That was one of the reasons he’d been so good at being Chronos the first time around.

Apparently someone else took over in the wake of the Time Masters. Or several someones. He walks through the room where the Oculus once sat and it still hurts, but he’s able to keep going. There’s an antechamber with jelly beans all over the floor. He remembers Rips fondness for them. A part of him wonders what happened to them. Wonders if they’d take him back. Except they have their own Mick...

There’s sound now, voices down a hallway, so he puts the thought aside and keeps going. 

Apparently he came in the back way because when he opens the final door, he finds himself next to the bathrooms in a dive bar that could belong to any era. The tables are solid well worn things with dents and chips and rings of condensation from the beer bottles. The pool table in the corner has patches where the green felt has been worn away to nearly nothing. The ceilings high enough for comfort, but low enough that the place still has a comfortably warm feel to it. The people are the same; loners sitting at the bar, a couple in the corner, two tables which have been pushed together to fit a group of seven. Everyone’s armed of course, and the clothing is a mix twenty first century practicality and thirty first century garmentech.

For the first time in a long time, he feels at home. Not like he can slide under the radar or muscle his way through, this is a place he actually fits, knows like an old memory, without quite knowing how. He wanders over to the bar, and sits at his usual stool. And it is his usual spot, because this place is outside of time and if he’s sat here a million times in the past or a million in the future doesn’t matter, it’s all the same.

He leans forward on his elbows and calls out to the man at the other end of the bar. He doesn’t realize what he’s saying until it’s out but again it feels right, even if it is impossible.

“Hey Len, cold one down here.”

The man turns, Len turns, dark gray turtleneck and an apron round his waist but otherwise exactly how Mick remembers him. He’s already got one of Mick’s favorite beers open for him. 

Len fishes a coaster from somewhere puts the bottle in front of Mick. “‘Bout time you showed up.”

“Yeah well, when you think a guy’s dead….”

Len makes a put upon face that Mick never thought he’d see again.

“It is you right?” Mick knows it is, but he has to ask anyway, has to hear it in words.

“Hard to kill someone outside of time, and since technically I killed myself….” 

Mick nods. He remembers it now, how the Time Masters had to convince someone else to die before they could kill them in this place. It was why they were so big on torture, and why they sent their minions back into real time to deal with the stubborn ones. Mick had been stubborn, and Len had always been right there with him.

He smiled and shook his head, looking down at his beer.

“Of course it does have some disadvantages.” Len went on, “Being schrodingers cat means leaving is a rather tricky business. I keep reverting back to earlier points in my timeline. I’ve lost count of the number of times my hand has frozen and then come back.”

Mick nodded along to Len’s complaints. He didn’t know if it was the transient nature of the place or just having his partner back, but Mick knew they’d figure it out. He was done wandering. It had taken a lifetime, but now he was starting over again. They’d get it right this time.

Len asked him a question, that he didn’t even need to hear. The answer was the same no mater how it was worded. 

He took a swallow from his bottle, “whatever you say boss.”

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [At the End (The Make Me Disappear Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12155049) by [saekhwa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saekhwa/pseuds/saekhwa)




End file.
